Following on from installing vROPS a few month back I finally made the jump to install the Blue Medora management packs for both Cisco UCS and NetApp to get greater visibility into my virtual environment and the underlying physical infrastructure. I’m really looking forward to seeing what these management packs have to offer. While I’m not going to cover off the dashboards provided by the management packs in this post it is something I plan on revisiting once it’s been in use for a while and I’ve done a bit more playing around with it. The reason I’m posting this deployment process is that despite Blue Medora having decent installation guide it’s not always 100% clear, so I’ve done this to hopefully help guide a few others through the process a bit easier.

Cisco UCS Management Pack Deployment

Before you begin this deployment you can download trial versions from Blue Medora and if you want a permanent installation purchase some licenses from Blue Medora.

As part of some recent evaluation work I did on vRealize Operations Manager and following a discussion with our VMware rep I installed vRealize Log Insight. It’s a product I’ve heard about before, largely in conjunction with EVO:RAIL as its part of the automatic deployment, but not a product that I’ve really seen a need for. As part of the vRealize Suite it links nicely into vROps so I thought why not give it a chance and see what it can do. So far I’ve been impressed. I’ve only configured it to monitor my VMware environment but it is also possible to get data from devices outside on the virtual platform. For want of a better example you can see Log Insight as a syslog server or a Splunk Server. There may be other ways of installing vRealize Log Insight Manager but below are the steps I followed to get the platform off the ground and it follows the similar steps to my earlier How-To: VMware vRealize Operations Manager Installation guide

I’ve recently being playing around with the vRealize Suite as part of on-going evaluations into various management tools. Today I’m going to cover the installation process for vRealize Operations Manager. There have been a number of improvements in the latest version of Operations Manager. It was not just a name change from vCOPS to vROps as part of the latest release, there have been a number of great features added and I think VMware have finally put the effort into making their management suite of products work cohesively. I’m not going to go into the ream of features and updates to vRealize Operations Manager as others have done a far better job at that than I can but I can provide a step by step installation guide.

DEPLOYMENT

Step 1:

Go to VMware vRealize site and download a trial version of vROps. You will require a VMware account to do this and agree to any licensing. You can download the OVA file for vROps to your local computer. Once you have downloaded the appliance you can go into vCenter and select Deploy from OVF Template